Research databases provide a wealth of technical and scientific information for researchers (i.e., commercial, academic, etc.). Research databases provide links to online libraries of documents related to medicine, government, etc., complete with searchable citations, bibliographies, etc., associated with those documents. Users can search the research databases by entering search criteria. From the results produced by a search, the user can download those documents of interest.
Online content source providers offer users the ability to access copyrighted material to read, print, or otherwise utilize documents via the appropriate conditional access to online versions of such documents. Such conditional access, if not available at no charge, is typically provided under a subscription or under a “pay per view” or one-time payment per item. Examples of content source providers are the original publisher of a document or content aggregators.
Research databases may provide search capabilities and links to i) documents for which only third parties are the content source providers, or ii) only documents for which the research database provider itself is the content source provider, or iii) a mixture of documents where either a third party or the research database provider is the content source provider.
Some content source providers are accessible to any user, while other content source providers require a subscription for access. The terms of the subscriptions vary and are set by platform providers and publishers. Subscriptions are purchased (either on individual level or as a package covering multiple users) by users. Generally, for any type of publisher content covered under their subscription, each user can download copyrighted materials to own computer, and keep them there for a period of time. But after copyrighted material is downloaded to a shared environment, in some cases multiple users cannot use the copyrighted material even if those users are a part of the same subscription group. In some cases, the copyrighted materials cannot be stored on an infrastructure where multiple users can access the copyrighted materials, instead of going to the original source of copyrighted materials.
It is commonly permissible to expose a full-text index of copyrighted materials to multiple users even when it is not permissible to expose the source document itself. Hence an organization could benefit from a content library with full-text searching for copyrighted materials consistent with its copyright permissions if it could create a content library which contained a full-text index of the documents of interest. However there is no ready means whereby users of research databases can create a usable index of this kind for documents coming from a large number of different content providers.